Readings for 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Wisdom 6:12-16; Psalm 63:2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13
Last Tuesday’s resounding Democratic victory over Trumpism has given us reason to hope. It suggests that Americans can recognize the connection between their daily struggles and a government that serves the wealthy while encouraging everyone else to blame immigrants, racial minorities, and one another. People struggling to pay for groceries, housing, and medical care have begun directing their anger upward. For those accustomed to ruling through division, that is dangerous.
The election hardly means that Democrats have become champions of liberation. Far from it! Too many remain beholden to the same donors, military interests, and corporate priorities as their Republican counterparts. However, voters have opened a door. The question now is whether those elected will walk through it —or once again squander this opportunity by prioritizing the interests of their wealthy sponsors.
Biblical Wisdom
That is where this Sunday’s readings enter the picture. Their theme is wisdom: the ability to recognize what is happening, receive instruction from unexpected sources, and make provision for the work ahead. And the first thing they tell us is that Wisdom is a woman. In a world whose most powerful men seem increasingly certain that their wealth entitles them to govern the rest of us, that deserves our attention.
Consider Peter Thiel. According to Christopher Hale’s account of a secretly recorded October 19 lecture, the billionaire concluded his Nashville series on the Antichrist by calling the city “arguably the global capital of Protestantism.” He urged his listeners to involve themselves in finance, technology, politics, and the battle of ideas. His final instruction was blunt: “get over your inferiority complex and fight.”
Fight whom? Read alongside Thiel’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV and his advocacy of safeguards for artificial intelligence, the appeal suggests a struggle over Christianity itself. Nashville’s Protestant constituency becomes a potential counterweight to Rome’s insistence that technological power must answer to human dignity. A billionaire whose interests are affected by public oversight is recruiting believers for a battle over the moral legitimacy of that oversight.
Theology Centralized
I never expected theology to become quite so openly relevant to our political struggles. Yet Thiel seems to understand something many Christians have forgotten: what we believe about God affects what we permit powerful people to do. A Christianity centered on private salvation can leave economic arrangements largely undisturbed. A Christianity that takes seriously Jesus’ good news to the poor eventually asks who owns everything, who makes the decisions, and who pays for the mistakes.
That second Christianity is troublesome for billionaires. It refuses to assume that the ability to develop a technology confers the right to impose its consequences on everyone else. It asks workers about displacement, parents about their children, and communities about surveillance and computerized warfare. From a liberation theology perspective, Leo’s demand for accountability belongs here. Those exposed to technological power deserve a voice in governing it.
Feminine Wisdom
Now listen to the alternative offered in today’s first reading. Wisdom comes looking for us. She waits at the gate, travels the roads, and meets those willing to receive her. She does not require an invitation to a closed-door lecture or admission to an exclusive circle. But she does require something that great wealth can make difficult: the willingness to be taught.
Her femininity matters. For centuries, churches have overwhelmingly pictured divine authority as male while restricting women’s authority to interpret it. Yet here Scripture places a woman before us as the embodiment of the understanding we need. She is active, searching, and persistent. Our task is to become receptive to her. That means surrendering the assumption that we already know because we hold the office, possess the money, or occupy the pulpit.
Liberation theology makes this receptivity concrete. It begins by listening to people whose experience prevailing arrangements teach us to dismiss. Ask a mother facing eviction whether the economy is working. Ask an immigrant harvesting our food what freedom means. Ask a Palestinian parent what our politicians mean by security. Ask a survivor of sexual exploitation how institutions protect their reputations while leaving children unprotected.
The poor and oppressed do not know everything. They do know things that their employers, landlords, generals, and benefactors can afford to ignore. That is the basis of their hermeneutical privilege—their particular ability to help us understand what is happening. The view from beneath the system exposes features that remain invisible from the boardroom. Wisdom requires allowing that testimony to change our minds and our policies.
Americans Not Hopelessly Divided
This is also why I question the endless insistence that Americans are hopelessly divided. Our disagreements are real, sometimes bitter. Nevertheless, most of us need the same basic things: affordable homes, adequate food, medical care, meaningful work, and a future for our children. There is also ground for solidarity in opposition to war, the destruction of Palestinians, sexual exploitation, and corruption. An election cannot prove agreement on all those questions. It can reveal an opening for bringing people together around them.
Divide-and-conquer politics works by concealing those possibilities. The immigrant becomes the explanation for low wages. The poor family becomes the explanation for public debt. Meanwhile, fortunes accumulate, weapons contracts multiply, and the people making the decisions present themselves as our protectors. Wisdom asks us to examine that diversion. Who benefits when the underpaid worker blames another underpaid worker?
The Epstein scandal gives this question a particularly ugly form. What I call the “Epstein Establishment” is the culture of access, deference, and protection surrounding people whose influence makes others reluctant to ask obvious questions. Association alone does not establish criminal guilt. But neither money nor political usefulness should shield anyone from investigation. Survivors deserve protection, the public deserves lawful disclosure, and credible evidence must be followed wherever it leads. The demand applies as firmly to church leaders as to financiers and presidents.
Here, too, wisdom is receptive. She listens to people whom institutions have trained themselves to disbelieve. She asks why a child’s account encounters so many obstacles while an influential man’s denial travels so easily. A church that preaches the social gospel must submit itself to that same scrutiny. Otherwise, its denunciations of worldly power become another exercise in protecting its own.
But today’s Gospel warns that recognizing injustice and welcoming an electoral victory are insufficient. Ten young women await a bridegroom. Five bring enough oil for a prolonged delay; five do not. All ten fall asleep. The wise women are as tired as the foolish ones. What distinguishes them is that they have made provision for a night longer than they expected.
That detail seems especially appropriate after Tuesday. Defeating Trumpism at the polls does not dismantle the interests that sustained it. They still possess money, institutions, media access, and the patience to wait for public enthusiasm to fade. Thiel’s appeal to fight should remind us that those interests are organizing. They intend to shape what comes next.
Our lamps need oil for that long night: organized communities, political education, independent sources of information, and habits of holding our own representatives accountable. We need people prepared to insist on affordable housing after the victory speeches end, to oppose war when their party supports it, and to defend immigrants when doing so becomes inconvenient. Those capacities develop through practice. They cannot be borrowed at midnight.
The psalm brings us back to thirst. Our souls thirst for God like dry earth thirsting for water. That image keeps spirituality close to the body and the land. People need actual water, actual bread, actual shelter. A religious language that turns those needs into mere metaphors allows us to feel spiritually nourished while our neighbors go hungry. The God for whom we thirst meets us in their demand to live.
Finally, Paul speaks to people grieving their dead. He assures them that those who have died will not be forgotten or left behind. For anyone struggling for liberation, that hope matters. The dead of war, exploitation, and preventable poverty are more than yesterday’s statistics. Their lives continue to make a claim on us. No election can bring them back, but the world we build can honor them or repeat the arrangements that killed them.
Conclusion
So let us welcome Tuesday’s victory and insist on what it makes possible. Let us listen before the consultants explain away the voters’ anger and the donors narrow the agenda. Wisdom is already at the gate. She may arrive as a woman whose testimony powerful men would rather dismiss, a worker they would rather replace, or a grieving parent they would rather keep off television. We will show that we have received her when their experience begins to govern our decisions. Until then, billionaires like Thiel will keep their hands on the switches—and call the arrangement Christian.
